Dive Brief:
- Less than half of senior executives feel satisfied with their organization’s decision-making process and more than one-quarter say they’ve contemplated resigning over frustration with how decisions are made, a new Kingsley Gate report conducted by FT Longitude found.
- One-third of respondents said they’ve previously left a job due to poorly aligned decision-making styles. FT Longitude surveyed 400 C-suite executives, including 80 technology leaders, in May and June for the executive search firm.
- While senior executives said data drives their decisions, nearly three-quarters admitted they rely on personal values and beliefs. Three in 5 acknowledged that gut instinct plays an important role.
Dive Insight:
Evidence-based and data-driven decisions are the gold standard in most businesses. Yet, often, when the time comes for a final decision, all numbers have already been triple checked and each potential risk weighed against the likely benefits. At that point, it’s instinct and experience leaders need, rather than more data.
CIOs collect information on IT vendors, products and services from a variety of sources throughout the procurement process, Forrester found. Executives tend to be most engaged in the final phases of the buying process, according to Forrester, when intangibles such as instinct come into play.
New technologies may not alter the process, but they can raise the stakes of purchasing and implementation decisions.
When enterprises clamored for cloud during the pandemic, rushed migrations led to uncontrolled costs and proliferating technical debt, according to a March SoftwareOne survey of 600 IT leaders.
Now, as interest in generative AI surges, tech leaders are faced with a new set of critical concerns, from practical data security risks to more abstract ethical problems associated with bias and misinformation.
"The CIO and CTO are going to have to apply a tremendous amount of thought, data and even intuition to the decisions they make around a technology like generative AI," Noam Eisenberg, Kingsley Gate senior partner and global technology practice leader, said.
Generative AI challenges leaders to make difficult decisions about whether to build their own models or rely on third-party vendors for tools that may expose sensitive data, Eisenberg said.
Nevertheless, one-quarter of respondents to the Kingsley Gate survey said they were not asked about decision-making capabilities when they interviewed for their job. Only one-third felt their decision-making style aligned with that of their organization.
“Contrasting decision-making processes are not inherently negative,” said Eisenberg. “Two people can have polar opposite styles but still be aligned in what they are trying to accomplish. It can be a tremendous positive if the styles are blended correctly.”
